You would not start form here

There is an international joke which goes something like this: "A sharp dressed man on a horse or car asks a farmer for directions to the big city who replies 'You wouldn't start from here'".  Much the same applies to a sustainable energy economy.

A street gas light (from somewhere posh?)

I recently came across a copy of "Everybody's Pocket Encyclopedia" dated 1891.   Somethings never change and others become irrelevant.  The list of 47 celebrities includes Prince Bismark who unified a number of German states into a single country and gave his name to at least one battleship.  Further down the pages is the actress Lilly Langtry who would have been a gift to today's Celeb magazines.  In the same spirit is a table of the  probability of a woman marrying at a given age and her weight for her height, evidently no such data was available for men.  In contrast there is a somewhat confusing method for estimating sidereal time and local time from longitude which implies the book was carried by people crossing continents (A lot of my family went west to America and East to Australia in the early part of the 20th century).  I'm guessing, but today few people are interested in the correct way to address a bishop.

At the end of the 19th century electricity was coming into general use but gas was a common fuel for lighting and coal provided warmth and the power for industry and transport.  The Encyclopedia's list of economic events is a bit patchy on electricity, for instance there is no reference to Nikola Tesla (who among other things developed the transformer) or to Charles Parson (steam turbines were a good way to turn generators).  However, the it has a few milestones for gas lighting:

• 1780 - The invention of the Argand Burner in Geneva
• 1786 - Lebon's Gas light invented
• 1792 - Murdoch's Gas Lighting Trial
• 1804 - Windor's Gas Patent
• 1807 - Clegg's Gas Works built
• 1813 - Westminster Bridge lit by Gas
• 1815 - Clegg;s Gas meter invented
• 1860 - Hugon's Gas Patent (Gas engine)

These events describe the production, use and commercialization of gas as a fuel.   From 1850, references to electricity become more frequent.  Whilst the displacement of gas lighting started in the latter years of the 19th century, the process did not approach completion until the 1920s, a span of approximately one generation.

There are plenty of fossils from the age of gas.  My own house has the remains of a network of gas pipes which supplied light fittings and geysers.  All this was installed before the advent of "Part P" regulations and some of the notches in the joists are well positioned.  Skips are a good source of social history, when a Victorian property is "gutted" gas pipes are often part of debris.

Edwardian fossils: The wall has a blanked off pipe showing the location of a gas lamp and the grate was part of the house's zoned heating system.

And my point is.....

The acceptance of a "new" technology which does not have to displace an old one, such as mobile phones, can be quite rapid, however, displacement can be a slower process.  In my view, the key technologies for the large scale adoption of sustainable energy sources are storage and management.  This includes devices such as the Tesla "PowerWall" and the internet of things both of which are recent innovations.  Utility scale wind turbines started appearing in the 1980's, solar PV became a mass market technology after 2000.  The table above spans a period of 80 years, these things take time, but if you were starting from scratch......